A Great Parliamentarian and a Close Personal Friend

The leader of the Conservative Party's wets has been praising his main enemy, who has so far overcome his concern for the suffering people of South Shields as to resign from British politics and cross the Atlantic for the purpose of spending more time with his tax breaks. As befits a creature which has received a fawning eulogy from Jack Straw, which the Reverend Blair considers "one of the most capable progressive thinkers and leaders globally", and which it is easy to imagine as a nodding supernumerary to his reverence's adventures on the lecture circuit, the Other Miliband's political career ran the gamut from bland to sordid. From the failed Putsch against Gordon Brown, which dragged and sputtered to its ineffectual end slightly faster than Brown dragged and sputtered to his, Miliband emerged looking slightly less statesmanlike than the smirking wideboy James Purnell. The family heavyweight's most memorable achievement while in office was probably his use of the environment as an excuse to shaft the Chagossians; his other brilliant coup was being caught running to the Americans for help in containing the torture scandal. This is the kind of thing Miliband calls "making a difference to the disadvantaged and vulnerable", though some people with less of a modernising streak might prefer that the difference was towards less misery rather than more.